(New York Times Notable Book) The book for which Michael Faber is best known in America, and the inspiration for the BBC miniseries of the same name starring Romola Garai and Chris O'Dowd, this is "the novel that Dickens might have written had he been allowed to speak freely" (Guardian, London), following 19-year-old Sugar as she ascends from a life of prostitution through the social strata of Victorian London. Longing to escape the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, the intelligent and ambitious Sugar becomes involved with perfume magnate William Rackham and his family, in a panoramic narrative with a host of lovable, maddening, unforgettable characters—preening socialites, drunken journalists, untrustworthy servants, vile guttersnipes, and whores of all stripes and persuasions.

"We find ourselves inside the heroine's head, led there by a rhetoric so skilled and daring that we hardly know it's operating.... This sympathy is neither sentimental nor observed.... We find feelings and states of being we didn't know we possessed."—NYTBR